Yes, for the big transitions (rock -> lava, water -> ice) there will have to be new textures. Some effects like glowing or frozen without a phase change, I guess it's enough to color the texture. Lightnings will be difficult, but also interesting to make.

Currently I'm trying to set up a color scheme to indicate such conditions, also to color items in the inventory view according to their magic properties.

Just want to say that this looks and feels like old school cRPGs such as Arcanum which I have made clear in other posts is one of my favorite games ever. I would love to help you on this, if you would like, in any way. shape. or form.

Yes, I'll appreciate any help very much. Since I made it open source it should be even easy, since we can use all the services that Sourceforge offers.

The areas which needs help most are game design ideas and graphics, particularly anything living and animated. While I have a rough outline of the world and the big quest arc, there will be a lot of small decisions to be made about locations, enemies and quests, and the past has shown that I'm not good at coming up with new ideas, so if you can help there, it will be great.

The only thing that I'm worried about, and which has made me abstain from asking for help yet, is my mental state. I've got a sort of OCD which can complicate things a lot, and anxiety related problems which at times make working together with other people very difficult. I really will enjoy to work with some people in a friendly cooperative group. I did so in the past, and it worked fine, then I had a serious breakdown from which I never really recovered. A sort of burn out/depression, real life accidents and losses, and being maltreated by people whom I had trusted.

I'll try my best to be a good project partner, but maybe I can't be the most reliable one.

Thank you for offering help. My own expertise is 15 years of professional Java development, almost 10 years of hobby C++ projects. I've got a good idea of object oriented program design, but usually I'm sloppy on methodologies and use whatever seems to the easiest way to solve a problem - the KISS principle. I used to overengineer solutions, then I made things too simple for a while and I hope that meanwhile I'm able to find good and easy solutions to many coding problems.

All archives will unpack into a "h-world-demo" directory, and the files should end up in the right structure if you just unpack the archives.

Making this open source was the last thing I did before I quit software development for some years due to my bad health state during that time. My coding skills are about the same as back then, the graphics skills should be a bit better.

Before my breakdown I had been a team leader at work for some years, with a team of up to four people. I stepped down from this position on my own request, because my problems to stay in long meetings with other people made it impossible for me; seemingly I was able to hide my inner turmoil from customers and other people well till then though, and on good days I still can be quite professional. On bad days I'm just a moody, grumpy and at times whiny sort of person, and if I notice that and if I'm allowed I just stay away from people till it gets better again. Everything else but "hiding" or "running away" just ended with conflicts in the past, and I'm quite unbearable to others on such days I assume.

Oh well. As said, it will be fine to work together with some people on such a big project idea, and I can offer solid programming and solid graphics within some limits. My social skills are often hampered, as said. I'm a complicated person, but able to feel with others and take care of individual needs and situations, unless my own mental state is too bad again.

Additional problem: My mother is in a nursing home since some months, an ischemic stroke left her disabled and her left side paralyzed. It takes much of my time to take care of her, also much power.

Quite a story. Understand that I am a student right now and really need to find a job so time is something that may be hard for me to catch. Right now my mother has stage 4 cancer which is very hard to deal with at times. She decided to get a medical marijuana license which is quite funny.

I have never done a group project before via internet only so this would be great for me.

I like the style in your game. It has a consistent art style and flow which is hard to come by. I can do some art although for this style prerender 3D seems like the best fit. Give me a list of sounds/music/art/code/story that needs attention.

Some ideas: Magic could be very powerful but also rare in the world. Make it so when the play finds something magical (item, new spell, scroll or something) it is like discovering the holly grail. Spells can be strong but may require time to cast. I like the idea of a non class based system. Give more freedom.

Not sure if you are doing races but if so:Elves. Every world has them be these all powerful beings. Gets old. maybe drop them completely or make them less God-like. Dwarves are always nice. Maybe not playable but as the search goes deeper find say a City with additional quests, shops, and what not. Halflings/gnomes/small people could again be non playable but make up some interesting NPCs.

I am not sure how you made your current assets but I am thinking of doing some wall/tiles right now and would like to know the right viewing angle you want.

Right now my mother has stage 4 cancer which is very hard to deal with at times. She decided to get a medical marijuana license which is quite funny.

Oh shit. Sorry for the drastic words, but cancer is such a bane. My dad died to cancer, so I have a bit of an idea what you are going through. I hope the marijuana will make her time as bearable as possible.

Tomorrow I'll try to figure out the right angle, at the moment I can only say that a rectangle must end up with 2:1 steps along the sides - for each two steps in x, a line moves up or down one step in y. This only applies to walls, though, the floors are automatically mapped via OpenGL, so any quadratic texture will do for a floor.

I'm using PovRay as my raytracing tool of choice. Blender sure can do the same and more, but I never got into Blender, despite trying seriously two times.

I've got some skills to adjust images from several sources to a uniform look, but there are cases when the differences are too big. In my very first public project I worked with many different artists who often only delivered one or two graphics so at some point streamlining graphics got one of the major tasks.

A few new walls will be fine, perfect if you can make a mine-like design with wooden bars to hold walls and ceiling, like these:

or these:

I like free-form character development schemes, too, so we can totally agree on that

I've got some blurry ideas about magic, and having a magic system which makes magic rare and difficult to use is alright - with difficult I do not mean a 98% fail rate of spells, but side effects. Like if a mage invokes the heat of the sun, he is at danger to burn himself badly. He can choose a lower invoke which he an control well, but isn't powerful, or a real strong invoke at the risk of being roasted alive - and he might want to prepare for that with having some sort of magical fire resistance first.

Somewhere in my archives I have a design for a magic system. Basically each spell had some words - first the power syllable, then the element, a shape and a target, and then finally a last modifier. The player will chose the syllables from a board, and each will take some power, and finally he can try the spell - if he used the highest power, controlling the spell will be very difficult, but even a beginner can try his luck this way.

Still working on an important element to item transformations - the mogrisphere. A magic device which is bigger on the inside than it appears from outside. In the hand of a skilled person in can be used to transform items into new items, adding magical and other properties. Or just to create genuinely new items from scrap.

Spent two days now on the design, and I'm still not satisfied with the result, but at least I have something to show now.

Here is an idea on ow to to the Terrain. Not the walls but just the flat surface.

You said that you do not use the pre rendered isometric tiles. Instead render a plane in the right perspective and use multi-texturing on it. You could use a chunking system to keep everything nice and organized for large levels. This will allow for very great detail on the terrains. Pained them via a brush would be great.

I am trying to figure out some things in blender but the UI is not at all intuitive.

I am trying to figure out some things in blender but the UI is not at all intuitive.

Yes, indeed. Without the tutorials and just memorizing a lot of things blender is difficult to use. I beleive that some functions are only available by keyboard shortcuts. Maybe just too well hidden, though.

Multi-texturing the floor seesm to be the way to go. The walls are real tiles though, but with some tricks I can put overlays on them as well.

If my calculations are right, the camera is 30° above the ground, and 45° rotated.

And it seems that true isometric is where the tiles are twice as wide as they are tall. I am playing with a few ideas but blender is really quite frustrating. I remember using 3ds max and having an easier time.

Example: I could not figure out how to exit the render preview. There are no buttons and you can endlessly keep splitting the screen into all sorts of views. Even google was little help. The blender guide was crap. I figured it out by doing the good old escape and bam, it exited render view. WHY IS IT SO CONVOLUTED? You click on the window in the top tool bar and it has 3 options. One is to split windows. I guess if you know all the shortcuts it is nice.

Here is some great place holder art. It is actually free but may not be the right angle. I have little experiance with 3d modeling and want to take this as a chance and motivator to learn. I am really good at UI though.

I have no idea why Blender is made to be so difficult to learn. Once you have memorized all the hidden commands all the tricks and pitfalls, you can obviously work quite well with it, but for a beginner it is horrible. I must admit I never mastered the entrance hurdle, becuase I used it only seldom and from one try to the next I had forgotten most of what I had learned last time.

No rush. It will take some weeks to become productive in blender. I remember that there have been a few good tutorials, but I don't seem to have the links anymore.

Please let me know which way you want to be credited for your work. There is a credits.txt file with pointers to the image sources, but I can also imagine to dedicate a place, item or something in the game to you. Maybe the rare potion "StumpyStrust's healing mircale" Just an idea.

PS: If you want to try something UI instead, a decorative bar for the lower border where some important stats can go, will be very appreciated. Two displays for health and magic power, and some slots for quick actions/spells/item usages will be required.

I added some buttons in the center as an example for where a menu button or inventory buttons could go. The left or uhh right side is empty as you requested for now. Anything you would like changed I can try and change it. I have a certain style which I may not be able to quench.

The middle section with the buttons is a good idea. Can you adjust the left side a bit to have the HP and mana meters appear more integrated? I think it's only a question how the borders are drawn, or how the meter borders merge with the bar borders.

I guess I can adjust the UIs that I made to match your style better, particularly the borders. I'd like to give the UI a "warm" hue, so far I've been using brownish and golden hues. Do you think you can adjust the borders and the bar background to that?

The grim skull-like decoration at the lower end of the meters is a nice idea - danger, close to death!

Here is one with better H/M integration I think. I noticed that black line under the H/M after I posted this. It will be fixed or deleted.

If you would like I can change the texture for the background and the border to something...warmer. I am not sure if it would clash too much. What about the style on the buttons but for the whole things border. Would that work?

To me this looks very fine. Maybe some gems instead of the bat, to stay in theme with the jewel hunt. I'd keep the separators, I think that in medieval decorations such can be found, too. The only big thing left to do is to adjust hue and brightness to match the other UIs, but I think that some deviations are acceptable, since this is a different sort of UI element anyways.

Myself, I've not done so much in the past days. I included some trees from opengameart.org, a dagger, and collected a few more graphics for integration. Furthermore I have prepared the player display code to show player graphics in 8 directions based on their movement.

I've also made an village map prototype, but I'll have to do it again, because I added more data to the map, and the old maps will come up with bad default values fro those. Later I must take better care of data migration.

Once I have a smith, or any shopkeeper, I'll need to work on the item trading UI and code.

Since a while I'm pondering about runic symbols. I'd like to include runes like Diablo II had them, to add new abilities to items. There are two questions, though:

1) How many different rune symbols should be used in the game?2) How to make/where to get inspiration for runic symbols?

I don't want to reuse real-world symbols, because I'd like to stay out of the discussions and beliefs revolving around real runic symbols. But how to make new ones?

I'm just chiming in randomly but...

You might want to look to the stars and constellations for inspiration of how to make new rune-like symbols. There is a lot of interesting shapes for constellations that might make interesting runic symbols if done correctly.

As for how many, I would just do it based on your needs. Ask yourself how many you need before it becomes complicated? KISS should help you keep your system under control. The last thing any game needs is someone having to learn a whole new language to play the game.

As for how many, I would just do it based on your needs. Ask yourself how many you need before it becomes complicated? KISS should help you keep your system under control.

It's difficult to make a good guess without having a full design.

1) Limited inventory size - if there are many rune types, the player can't carry one of each all the time. Now the question is, if this is wanted, or if it is unwanted.2) Learning - as you said, fewer types are easier to memorize3) Effects - Players usually do not like holes, e.g. if a game has fire, ice, lightning as elements, then players will ask for runes of all three types, and complain if the game has only two of the three.

Since your taking a lot of ideas from Diablo, you may want to go check out the game Path of Exile: it's got very similar gameplay and it's free! ^^

Very interesting, thanks for the link! They also seem to think that the item system was one of the best features in D2, "Path of Exile is completely designed around items." - I'm trying to do it similarly and make the creation, combination and modification of items one of the central parts of the game.

Now I must take care not to get too much hooked, otherwise there will be a loooong break until I can continue with the jewel hunt

I'm leaning towards a smaller number too. Let's wait though with the work, till there is a more precise idea what the runes will do, and how they will be used. I'm just trying to brainstorm ideas, maybe the runes can be good for more than they did in D2.

I had problems with the more abstract parts of math. Geometry and everything that had a good visual representation (function curves don't really count here), was way easier for me.

Don't worry about being busy with other things. Last week I felt quite down, and there were a few difficult days at work and also in private. Then I've been busy writing articles for my blog. I must push myself a bit to get back, and for some strange reason I'm a bit out of ideas where to start again. I think I'll finally try to make the village map, so that I can work on the shop UI and item trading.

I've been asking around about the runic symbols and it seems most of the simple symbols already got some meaning. I've sketched up a few ideas revolving around the moon cycle, the sun and stars. These symbols are well known for once, and also in widespread use already so there shouldn't be a problem with a hidden and bad meaning.

I think I must announce a break. I'm in a motivational slump, and I have lost muich of my endurance with a project, that I once had.

Thank you Stumpy, for your help. It's been fine to work together with someone, it gives me hope that some day when my mental problems have bettered further, I can gather a team and do bigger projects again.

I can't say if this is the end of the project, or if I will pick it up again. I use to change my mind quite often on such, so it's possible that I'll be back in some weeks or months. But it's also possible that I do what I have planned since a long while, to give up on software projects, maybe computer related projects alltogether, and turn towards "hand made", art-related projects.

Hey man thanks for letting me help with this. I really needed an excuse to do some art work as I really to love the drawing but rarely am inspired. This project has given me many ideas and I will probably improve the GUI by adding some Gems and may work on some Inventory and tilesets when I get a chance. I wish the best to you and apologize for not being able to contribute more.

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